Okay, so first things first, let me get this off my chest.

Vim, I’ve been cheating on you. I know that I’ve said you’re all the IDE I could ask for and that you were there for me when I was with a 2GB-of-ram-craptop, when I was writing LaTeX or when I logged in that 20+ year old server.

But here’s one of the many reasons why I’m never giving up on you.

The ‘repeat’ command

When in Normal mode, you can command vim to ‘repeat’ the last change with the . key.

That’s all you have to know to start using it, but you can always consult the manpages by :help single-repeat.

The simplest of examples : say that you copy a line with yy. Move to some other place and paste with p. Move to another place, and repeat your last command (the paste) with .. Or use 5. to paste it 5 times.

Or you want to indent and initialize some struct values as ints. That would be i<tab>int and then j^.j^. to get to the start of the next line and repeat the command for these lines as well.

Or you want to change a word for substitutions, you can cw<new-word> and then move around and change similar words using the dot.

Limitations

Unfortunately, the dot command does not repeat Normal sequences such as moving around or replaces. That means that you can’t easily avoid sequences like the j.j. above. This is solvable by recording and using a macro :help recording.

Also, to repeat an Ex command, use ` @:` for the same effect

Until next time!